An author may create a document having information that is suitable for consumption by some readers, but not others. For example, a medical record may contain sensitive information regarding patients; in many jurisdictions, the law may prevent the author from divulging the sensitive information to non-authorized individuals. To address this issue, the author may choose to obfuscate sensitive items within the document, to produce an obfuscated or “sanitized” document. Obfuscation may constitute removing the sensitive items, and possibly replacing the sensitive items with dummy items having no sensitive content (e.g., by replacing an actual patient name with the fictional name “John Doe”). The author may then distribute the obfuscated document to appropriate recipients. To complete the transaction, the recipients may read or analyze the obfuscated document in accordance with different application-specific objectives. In this context, the recipients operate as “endpoint consumers” of the obfuscated document, and the transactions may be characterized as “one way,” e.g., proceeding from the author to the consumer.
While generally effective for its intended purpose, the above-summarized strategy is designed for only one kind of transaction involving the dissemination of documents. The strategy may not be well suited for other, more complex, transactions.